A treatment of plurals and plural quantifications based on a theory of collections
Minds and Machines 3 (4):453-474 (1993)
| Abstract | Collective entities and collective relations play an important role in natural language. In order to capture the full meaning of sentences like The Beatles sing Yesterday, a knowledge representation language should be able to express and reason about plural entities — like the Beatles — and their relationships — like sing — with any possible reading (cumulative, distributive or collective).In this paper a way of including collections and collective relations within a concept language, chosen as the formalism for representing the semantics of sentences, is presented. A twofold extension of theA–C concept language is investigated: (1) special relations introduce collective entities either out of their components or out of other collective entities, (2) plural quantifiers on collective relations specify their possible reading. The formal syntax and semantics of the concept language is given, together with a sound and complete algorithm to compute satisfiability and subsumption of concepts, and to compute recognition of individuals. | |||||||||
| Keywords | No keywords specified (fix it) | |||||||||
| Categories | ||||||||||
| Options |
|
|||||||||
Download options| PhilPapers Archive |
Upload a copy of this paper Check publisher's policy on self-archival Papers currently archived: 5,664 |
| External links |
 |
| Through your library | Configure |
Similar books and articlesHelen Morris Cartwright (1993). On Plural Reference and Elementary Set Theory. Synthese 96 (2):201 - 254.
Margaret Gilbert (2002). Collective Guilt and Collective Guilt Feelings. Journal of Ethics 6 (2):115-143.
Byeong-Uk Yi (2005). The Logic and Meaning of Plurals. Part I. Journal of Philosophical Logic 34 (5-6):459-506.
Melinda Bonnie Fagan (2011). Is There Collective Scientific Knowledge? Arguments From Explanation. Philosophical Quarterly 61 (243):247-269.
Alex Oliver & Timothy Smiley (2006). A Modest Logic of Plurals. Journal of Philosophical Logic 35 (3):317 - 348.
Byeong-uk Yi (2006). The Logic and Meaning of Plurals. Part II. Journal of Philosophical Logic 35 (3):239-288.
Boudewijn de Bruin (2009). We and the Plural Subject. Philosophy of the Social Sciences 39 (2):235-259.
Juha Kontinen & Jakub Szymanik (2008). A Remark on Collective Quantification. Journal of Logic, Language and Information 17 (2):131-140.
Gilad Ben-Avi & Yoad Winter (2003). Monotonicity and Collective Quantification. Journal of Logic, Language and Information 12 (2):127-151.
Analytics
Monthly downloads |
Added to index2009-01-28Total downloads8 ( #122,951 of 549,005 )Recent downloads (6 months)1 ( #63,327 of 549,005 )How can I increase my downloads? |
My notes
Discussion
